Evan Greer is a Boston-based transgender activist, musician, and
campaign director for digital rights group Fight for the Future.

Modern surveillance programs would be a
disaster under President Trump

President Obama has just 71 days until Donald Trump is
inaugurated as our next commander-in-chief. That means he has a matter of weeks
to do one thing that could help prevent the United States from veering into
fascism: declassifying and dismantling as much
of the federal government’s unaccountable, secretive, mass surveillance state
as he can — before Trump is the one running it.

During the Obama administration, warrantless spying programs have
vastly expanded, giving the government more power than ever before to
constantly monitor all of us by collecting our emails, texts, phone records,
chats, real-time locations, purchases, and other private information en masse.
This indiscriminate spying isn’t just happening in some National Security
Agency bunker. It has reportedly spread
throughout dozens of agencies, from local police departments to the Drug
Enforcement Administration,Internal Revenue Service, and more.

Trump has repeatedly called for more government
surveillance. And he has made it veryclearexactly how he
would use such powers: to target Muslims, immigrant families, marginalized
communities, political dissidents, and journalists.

Our next President has shown utter disregard for the U.S.
Constitution, exposing himself as an openenemy of press
freedom, repeatedly saying he would ban all members of a major world religion
from entering the country, and lashing out at political opponents with censorship
and lawsuits that make a mockery of free speech. Let’s not forget that he has
also called for women
who seek abortions to face punishment, has boasted about
sexual assault, and is currently facing multiple court cases related to sexual
harassment and abuse.

The surveillance apparatus that has grown in this country since
9/11 has always been wrong. Surveillance technology, often used without a
warrant, has been repeatedly abused to target
specific racial, ethnic, and religious groups. The government listens in on
activists from groups like Black Lives Matter to Standing Rock. We’re collecting more data than
we know what to do with. Experts agree this
information overload is not effective at stopping violent attacks. In fact, it
has undermined, rather than strengthened, public safety and security.

In Trump’s hands, these programs could become more dangerous than
ever before. Too many of these efforts operate shrouded in secrecy,
without meaningful oversight from the
public, the courts, or even elected officials. The precedent set by expanding
executive power during the last several administrations means that Trump, and
the officials he appoints, will be able to use these pervasive snooping
programs for their own political ends, almost completely unrestricted, and
without transparency.

Mass surveillance has already had a
statistically measurable chillingeffect on freedom
of expression. Imagine how much more harm it could do in the hands of President
Trump. The future of our most basic rights and freedoms is at risk.

This is exactly why unfettered government spying programs are
so dangerous. No matter what their creators’ intentions may be, their use can
quickly spiral out of control. The recent prosecutions of whistleblowers under
the Espionage Act, which the Obama administration has normalized over the last
decade, will only embolden Trump to abuse his new power to surveil, censor, and
incarcerate dissenters to the fullest extent possible.

The country is now counting on President Obama. This is his last
chance to secure his legacy as the President who, in his final hours in office,
did something extraordinary.

He should shut down the NSA and related mass surveillance
programs. He should physically destroy the databases where the sensitive
personal information of hundreds of millions of people are illegally stored. He
should release Chelsea Manning and pardon Edward Snowden. He should
support efforts in Congress to curtail location-tracking and
other dangerous data collection. He should declassify and reveal to the public
any programs that he does not have the power to end. He should drag them into
the light of day so we have a fighting chance of stopping them during Trump’s
reign.

He should bulldoze the data centers, computers and all, if he
has to. He alone has the power to dismantle the U.S. surveillance state,
before it falls into the wrongest of hands.

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs